“Why Is This Age Worse…?” by Anna Akhmatova

1.
The tips of my fingers are numb when I wake up. It’s been happening for weeks. There’s a dull ache—a pinched nerve—in my right knee all the way up to my inner thigh. One time I was standing in the kitchen, and I hiccuped—and experienced the most painful muscle spasm in my lower back.

2.
Is it aging, or is it being alone, the way I notice all these twinges my body makes. When something hurts and I call out, no one will hear.

3.
Outside, right now: people are still disinfecting the streets. Today, in the news: more cases. Scientists are saying it will get worse.

4.
I’ve been staring at the blank page for hours now, willing myself to write. But what? Once again I circle back to questions upon questions, and never enough answers, words repeating until they lose their meaning, until all I have left is the silence.

“Why Is This Age Worse…?”Anna Akhmatova

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitters in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

— 1919

—

This is from Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward, published by Mariner Books, 1997.

I was just comforting myself that Akhmatova was talking about man-made plagues and man-caused wars and disasters.

But the conscience in my head interrupted this thought. We are in the midst of a ‘natural’ pandemic but its effects would be negligible if we had a world in which everyone had access to preventative medical attention and in which nobody lived in shanty towns and favelas and ghettoes. And these, like Akhmatova’s griefs are caused by wo(men) too.

Just want to sing back to you from across the sea that I’ve been reading your posts for years. I am so grateful for your voice.I get about a dozen poems each day from various sites, and am most thankful not only for the poems you choose, but, even more, your own writings and the deep musings within the words. Deep bows.